Get Your Tractatus On
Get Your War On’s David Rees has written a fucking hysterical essay on. . .Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
If you can’t be bothered to read the whole thing (cuz you’re lame), at least dig some quotage:
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus reads like a calculator’s weblog about C-3PO’s honors thesis, or an instruction manual for meaning itself translated from the algebra by Data from Star Trek Voyager. The book’s skeleton is a septet of underwhelming statements: “The world is all that is the case;” “A thought is a proposition with a sense.” The intellectual savagery of this book lies in what spins out of these nodes, furious and brilliant. Each initial statement is broken out into sub-statements which are numbered according to Wittgenstein’s secret taxonomy. For example, paragraph 3.33 (”In logical syntax the meaning of a sign should never play a role…”) is elaborated by paragraph 3.331 (”From this observation we turn to Russell’s ‘theory of types’. It can be seen that Russell must be wrong.” [Oh SNAP!!! How much did Bertrand Russell hate reading paragraph #3.331 in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus?])
and
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus famously ends with proposition #7, the only proposition not followed by a decimal-pointed elaboration. Proposition #7 specifically forbids readers to use language to talk about the things that lie beyond language. (Wittgenstein’s analogy was, Why use a ladder to climb a house with no roof?) But here is the great paradox of it all: Wittgenstein had to use language to say that! Because we hadn’t developed emoticons yet. : )
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According to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, language’s only proper use is the description of states of affairs that can be verifiably true or false: those involving solids, liquids, or gases. Nothing else properly falls within language’s words. The traditional philosopher may object: WHAT ABOUT MY FAVORITE QUESTION, “WHAT IS THE GOOD?” The Good is not a solid, a liquid, or a gas, so we can’t use language to talk about it. Same with religion, ethics, metaphysics, and all the profound subjects traditional philosophers usually talk about. From now on those topics will be off-limits to language. You want to discuss the Good? Go play a guitar solo in your jam band about the Good. Just don’t mess up the alphabet trying to talk about it.